SOMA: Robot girl
by Jerricom
Summary: She was taken by the WAU and comdemned to roam Omicron in a murderous rage, furious over her fate and agonized by her new body. But in the midst of this hell of a "life", she meets someone unexpected...


**SOMA** : **Robot girl.**

In her waking dreams she sees a face framed by long brown hair, dark red lipstick and a pair of large, blue eyes. Her vision distorts like a broken computer screen and sometimes another face breaks in, another feminine face with short-cut blonde hair but black sludge leaks out from its empty eyes and mouth, veins bulging and just as black. Sometimes the face is twisted by anger, sometimes black-smudged hands are covering its eyes and the black sludge leaks between its fingers like tears, but most of the time her sight is so distorted she can't make anything out. Visions pieced together from her fragmented memory flash before her eyes, constantly reminding her of the fact that almost a year ago now she died from asphyxiation, her throat crushed by someone in a diving suit and a face as black as night and glowing white eyes who then left her to rot at the bottom of the ocean. But she woke up again, lying on a table surrounded by the black machines the WAU has grown.

Her body had rotted away in the water but the WAU 'repaired' her, and now the pain these augmentations cause her is the only constant in her life. One of WAU's computers has been forcefully merged with her brain, she can feel it burning on the left side of her head. The two vie and wrestle for control, the computer misinterpreting her body's biological impulses and her brain misunderstanding the mechanical ones, turning her world and her life into a blur of noise constantly shifting between electronic buzz and sounds she can recognize. Her vision during the few times she's not overcome by waking nightmares is constantly focusing and unfocusing and going in and out of colour vision or showing bits of code scrolling across her field of view, where words such as _DEATH_ , _WAU_ , _REVIVE_ , _MERGE_ and _LIFE_ can be seen amongst the random bits of text.

She does not feel alive. All she feels is pain, fear and an oft-overwhelming self-pity. The WAU revived her, but she doesn't feel alive because she doesn't remember how it felt to be alive at all. She remembers that once her life had some purpose, some reason to want to remain alive. She doesn't feel alive anymore because she can see no purpose to her existence beyond the WAU-imposed purpose of simply being. For months this 'life' has been nothing but a migrane-esque nightmare, wracked by pain she's never quite grown numb to and haunted by the whispers of the WAU. No people, no other WAU monsters, no life. Just mechanically reanimated mice and insane helper robots that believe they're human.

She's standing over one right now, a bulbous little thing with a gripping arm protruding from the top of its body. It's screeching about something, obviously angry over being pinned down on an operation table like that. It calls itself Mark Sarang. She blinks her right eye and turns away, that act alone making her groan with pain, and walks out of the room. She has long since stopped attempting to destroy these mockingbirds, the WAU is always there to repair them; that is also why she has long since stopped attempting to commit suicide. She turns to the right beyond the door, shambling through the to her impossibly long corridor. As she nears the end her vision begins distorting and a high-pitched whirring noise blots out all other sounds; she raises her left hand and massages her pounding and aching temple, whimpering in discomfort. Then her foot hits something soft on the ground and she trips over, striking the ground hands-first with a loud metallic thud.

For a moment she lies there fighting back tears, her kneecaps and left-hand palm feeling as if the skin has split open, even though on inspection she's barely bruised herself. She gets into a sitting position with some difficulty and looks at her right arm; the metal pincer that's replaced that hand has lodged itself in the floor. She spends a few moments testingly pulling at it, and with a hard yank it comes out and she falls backwards, over whatever it was she stumbled upon; looking to her left there's a man lying in a fetal position on the floor, she can barely tell with how her vision distorts as she looks at him. Most of him has been replaced with machinery, and he's still breathing.

This is the first time in months she's seen anything even remotely human-looking. Anger overtakes her and with a high-pitched screeching she plunges her pincer arm into the man's chest, the sudden outburst of fury generating a pulse of electromagnetism so potent that all the structure gel-built machinery in his body just liquefies before her eyes, and the rest of his desiccated body follows. The sickly black sludge now stained red expands over the floor and is either absorbed by a nearby WAU growth or seeps down through cracks in the floor, leaving only a small black puddle upon the ground where a man once lay.

Panting and whimpering she rises to her feet, a shrill rasping sound coming from somewhere down in her chest rather than throat, and moves on. After a while she enters a room full of large pipes and small lockers on the walls, which is when the visions strike again. Her head burns as if drenched in acid, it spreads through her nervous system and freezes her in place as the images once again flash before her eyes; she sees is a young Asian girl with near-black hair who pushes a large steel door open, stepping into blinding sunlight and then the sequence repeats, over and over and over again. Some of the times, she can hear herself say something to the black-haired girl, who replies with a shrug and a mischievous smirk.

The pain eventually wears off and she returns to the dark room. This time she can't keep the tears out and her face falls into her open palm, her claw resting against her forehead, and she begins sobbing in a horribly distorted and hoarse voice. Crying never quite satisfies her self-pity any more, she doesn't even have eyes that can well up with tears; her left eye is covered by the WAU computer box with a small electronic optical sensor on it, and her right one has been replaced by the azure-glowing power core going from somewhere in her chest up into her jaw and skull. All that wets her hands is the structure gel that's constantly leaking out of the machine parts fused to the left side of her skull, thick and sticky almost like syrup.

Like that she remains for a long time, crying like she does so often. Then suddenly a loud clanking noise brings her out of her sobbing, at once completely alert. There's something here. No doubt some new trick of the WAU, she thinks to herself. It did this to her because it does not understand what the human mind is, it has told her so. It tries to understand, to comprehend, and so subjects her to experiments in order to learn. But she will not have it! She will not be its puppet! There's another clanking behind her, and flashing her pincer she screams "Get away from me!", hoping the WAU will hear. A moment passes, no more noises. Blinking apathetically, she slowly descends back into her pit of sadness, the WAU forgotten, and the pale azure light from her mouth and neck fades as she begins sobbing again.

Eventually she calms down and wanders on, returning to where she had been earlier; another long corridor that leads to the part she had previously been, it had turned out to be a dead end. There's a single door that she tried to open earlier but couldn't; now she presses the button again, which just bleeps with an error message. Growling in frustration, a noise more akin to metal scraping against stone than anything else, she jams her pincer into the thin line where the door's two parts separate. She twist it slowly to open up a crack wide enough to fit her fingers into, and then it's just a matter of pulling the doors apart. One of the very few benefits of her 'augmentation' is an enhanced physique, with which she can slowly force the door open. Beyond the door is a large room filled with tables and display screens, as well as additional rooms to either side. The screens are a cerulean, bluish green with white text scrolling continuously over them, code and random words; _DEATH_ , _WAU_ , _REVIVE_ , and _LIFE._ As she watche the datastreams she suddenly glimpses another few words amongst the seemingly random stream of letters and numbers, words that she cannot recall ever to have seen in the data streams before; _CATHERINE_ , _IMOGEN_ , _SIMON_.

Catherine.

Imogen.

Simon.

Catherine…

The name stirs up some part of her brain that she hasn't used in a long while; she tries to remember. For the first time in a long while, thinking really hard doesn't cause her pain so immense she collapses into screaming and sobbing. Her head aches, but it's something she can bear under the circumstances; she has long since stopped trying to find comfort in memory, it never seemed to help much, but now she is curious. Just as she stands there trying to remember, however, she can suddenly hear something akin to a gasp, and something falling to the metal floor with a loud clanking noise. She spins on her heel, pincer bared and face at once contorted with anger over being interrupted again by the WAU, and indeed out in the corridor just beyond the door stands one of the Warden Units's monsters, a diving suit covered in structure gel with two red little eyes staring at her through the helmet. It's carrying a large glass container as well as some electronics, a piece of which the thing as dropped in its shock over seeing her.

No doubt it's going to carry that stuff off to make more monsters for the WAU, she thinks and shrieks in undignified anger and outrage, and charges; the walking diving suit doesn't get far, and she runs her pincer clean through its back and severing the spinal cord, throwing the unmoving body to the ground. It screamed and everything, a very impressive imitation she thinks bitterly. She pulls the helmet off, revealing the stump of a neck sticking out of the diving suit with the thing's "head" sitting in it, electronics soaked with structure gel. Not human, not even close, it's an amalgamation. Her nostrils flare with disgust and she rises, crushing the thing's head beneath her metallic left heel. No doubt the WAU will fix this thing soon enough, but she can settle for a moral victory against the WAU. Even now she can feel electromagnetism surging through the piping, the floor and through her very own self to instruct the structure gel in its body to somehow repair the damage. She grimaces and continues, her earlier ruminations forgotten.

Then she hears a voice. Words, emotion, real meaning. She frowns, and after a moment's indecision starts walking down the corridor where the voice is coming from. It's female, high-pitched and vaguely electronic. It seems to be calling out a name: "Simon! Simon!" Skills that have since long lain dormant inside her mind now surface, and gradually she begins piecing together the tone of the voice; fear, hysteria, desperation. She trundles through the doorway at the end of the corridor and finds herself in a large, rectangular room; directly to her left there's computer terminals, further forward there's a huge airlock and beyond that an alcove filled with pressure suit cabins and a pilot seat. The room is lined with cameras as well, one which is active and where the voice is coming from; it promptly goes silent as she enters the room, looking up at it.

The silence lasts long enough that she grows disinterested and walks into the room, apathetically inspecting a large table with some random equipment on it. Then she hears a quiet, sorrowful sobbing that comes and goes over the intercom, rising and falling like the static on a radio when you're slowly adjusting frequency. It has a metallic tone to it, raspy and coarse; seemingly random words, names and phrases roll out of the speakers; curses, prayers, Simon. She slowly turns around and sees a computer screen with the picture of a face on it, mildly distorted but perfectly recognizable. The vision of the little Asian girl pushing a heavy steel door open and to be momentarily overwhelmed by sunlight comes on again, and this time the girl turns around to her; carbon-black hair hanging down to either side of the lean, hawk-like face, not very different at all from the face on the screen. It's just a fixed, unmoving image, smiling even, but she knows well enough it's the personality inside the computer that's crying. Her lips separate and from somewhere down in her chest a single tentatively word is uttered in a hoarse, electronic and raspy voice, _"Catherine..?"_

The sobbing abruptly stops, and another of the video cameras, the one hanging above the console, lights up instead. For another few moments there's silence as she and the camera stare at one another. She then at a random impulse tilts her head to the side, which shows something previously hidden underneath her jaw; a birth mark, and at once the voice in the camera shouts "OH MY GOD, MIA IS THAT YOU?!"

She blinks, the optical sensor covering her left eye flashing. Mia? Yes, that was actually her name. She nods, apathetically, standing in a slightly hunched stance over the console with her arms hanging limply by her sides. " _Y-yes. Is it you, Catherine?"_ Her voice is still rasping, even and blank. She hasn't used her voice for anything but screaming obscenities and threats the last half few months.

"Mia, you-… You killed Simon!"

She flinches a little at that. _"Who? That proxy in the corridor?"_

"Yes, that- Proxy?!" Catherine's voice is exasperated and angry. "You think that was just some unthinking brute?! I heard you screaming bloody murder and then you killing Simon! You didn't even stop and ask, you cold-hearted fucking murderer!" With what limited facial muscles she still retains, Mia manages a frown, _"That was just a proxy, Catherine. A creation of the WAU. They are all nothing more than walking talking boxes of flesh and structure gel, thinking that they are good enough to be called human!"_

"And who are you to judge what is and isn't passable for a human?!" Catherine retorts, her voice growing almost vicious, "How many **people** , robots with thinking and feeling people in them have you killed on your little crusade, huh?! And what about yourself? Are you any better?"

" _I'm still me! The WAU never changed who I am, just my body."_ Mia gestures out through the doorway she came through, _"That thing out there isn't human. The WAU doesn't understand! It spews out sleepwalkers and minds trapped inside robots, it-"_

"How am I any different? Why haven't you destroyed **me** yet?" Catherine suddenly interrupts Mia by asking, her voice at once calm but subtly condescending, as if expecting Mia to not be able to give a good answer. Mia's face twists into an expression of anger, and she raises her pincer, _"Yes, why shouldn't I destroy you now?"_

"Because," Catherine begins, gentle and rational, "I'm still me. When we consider other human beings, our feelings towards them and how we treat them, we're not considering the bag of flesh and blood that make up our bodies, it's the mind inside. That's why things like love based on looks never last; we are attracted to and interested by what people **think** , and what they believe, not what they look like. you and I have been friends since we were little kids, and we've both changed a lot since then, but we still hung on to each other, and why? Because we intrigued one another, and complemented each other's weaknesses; you always carried me through a party and I helped you study. That Catherine is still here, it's still me, even though I'm not walking around in Catherine's body."

Mia blinks once, feeling the value in Catherine's arguments weigh down on her. _"Oh god, what have I done…"_ Her legs tremble and give out beneath her, and she collapses onto the computer console sobbing and hulking in a horrible cacophony of electronic noise. _"Catherine, I have destr-… I have killed so many… H-how long do you think i-it takes before Simon is-?"_

"Repaired? Dunno. Few hours, judging by what you did to him. And then he probably will have to be reset by the WAU. He'll be alright, but no use to me I'd imagine." There's no bitterness towards Mia, something she had expected, only a sort of humble resignation to defeat. _"Use to you? What do you mean?"_

"Do you remember the ARK project, Mia?"

" _Y-yeah… I think so. The vivarium..?"_

"Exactly. The ARK is at Tau, ready to go. Me and Simon here were going to go to Tau and launch it into space, just like the other Catherine would have wanted. I'm honestly curious to find out what stopped them…"

She remembered. Brain scans of people inside a computer, out amongst the stars. She never got the chance to take a scan herself, and was sceptical to the value of the project to begin with; but now she gets a growing feeling that it might be something worth doing. Mia looks down at the omni-tool connected to the computer terminal, with the WAU-infested cortex chip attached to it; Catherine is in there, and Simon was carrying her.

" _What if… What if I took you there instead?"_

 **End of SOMA: Robot girl.**

Author's note:

So this is what a recent stroke of inspiration resulted in! I've put "Beneath the archangel's wing" on ice for the moment, I need to write something else for a bit in order to recharge my NGE "writing energy", if you're feeling poetic. So this SOMA fanfic instead! I love the game, will probably write more about it. Maybe more on this one as well! I could write another chapter or two on this if you guys and girls want me to :) Just say so if you happen to post a review: I'm not trying to extort reviews out of you here, you could PM me as well, I'm just not sure myself if this is a good and proper ending or not.

End of author's note.


End file.
